The Price We Pay For 'Being' is Suffering

Life is messy, or as Buddha said "life is suffering". One thing for sure is that life is full of obstacles and challenges, and in many ways that's what makes life intersting, multi-layered and provides depth.

Suffering is necessary, without lows we can not experience highs, our life experience becomes shallow and meangingless, the opposite of a rich full life.


Over the last 6 years I have suffered many losses which led to depression. Now that I am beginning to feel myself again. Unless you have experienced depression it is very difficult to comprehend the depths of despair it can take you. For me those moments could be summed up by two words 'fuck it'.

Unfortunately the 'fuck it' attitude led me to make decisions which in turn increased my depression, and resulting in a sense of being stuck. 'Fuck it' is giving up or a giving in when it comes to doing anything to help me climb out of the pit. For example; eating well and exercising. When you are depressed, and dealing with internal struggles, sometimes the only option feels like 'fuck it' because you simply don't have the strength to make things better. I see now how 'fuck it' trapped me in a cycle of self destructive behaviour.

I recently heard a fabulous program on CBC Radio called 'Say No To Happiness' I highly recommend having a listen.

Here are a few snippets which really resonated with me - (not quite verbatim, but close enough)

Happiness doesn't propel us forward, it does not create meaning and purpose. To open yourself up to happiness you have to also open yourself up to deep loss and sorrow. The purpose of life is not happiness, and this is in fact a relief. Life is complex, and tragic and difficult. The problem with the public portrayal of the ideal state of humanness as happiness, is that it makes people feel ashamed of their own suffering. If you are suffering and you find your life tragic in it's essence then that means that there is something wrong with them and this makes it impossible to for them to communicate anything real about their own tragedy.  

"If you are constantly in a state of placidity, satisfaction and happiness then nothing is going to affect you deeply enough; not your own suffering, not the suffering of others, not injustice, not the horrors of the world, then nothing is going to affect you deeply enough so that you become deep and life without depth is by definition shallow and meaningless, and the problem is that because life is tragic and involves suffering, if your philosophy is shallow and meaningless when you suffer you will become recently and hostile and self critical and then you will become cruel and destructive and so not only is there a necessity for your own mental health to forth rightly confront the deepest questions of life but if you don't you become a danger to yourself and more importantly to others."

At the end of the show they talk about the benefits of using your values as a compass to navigate through life, rather than happiness.

One way to examine your values is to find words which represent your consciousness, here are mine;

• Loving
• Kindness
• Compassion
• Courage
• Curiosity
• Complexity
• Childlike wonder
• Nature lover
• Humour

An excercise which can help you connect with you values is to list three people you admire. You don't need to know them, they don't even have to be real, they can be ficticious, superheros, animated characters. Once you have this write down some of the qualities that you like about these people. Often this list will mirror your own values - what we admire in others is actually what we admire about ourselves.

~ Future Forward